The remarkable thing about today’s track, The Werewolf Song, is that it comes from the first album by Michael Hurley. Remarkable because it is a song of some rare depth, full of disturbing imagery, set to a discordant accompaniment and sung in a way that, after one listen, can never be forgotten. That debut album, First Songs, came out originally in 1964, and it is now going to be rereleased by Smithsonian Folkways on November 6th. Even the background to the album is remarkable – after leaving Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where Hurley was recovering for six months from hepatitis, mononucleosis, and early traces of tuberculosis from a bohemian life in Greenwich Village, Hurley began renting a small stone house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Not far away lived Frederic Ramsey Jr., who recorded First Songs in his own New Jersey home, eschewing a professional recording studio at Hurley’s request, and kicking off Hurley’s lifelong practice of crafting lo-fi (a term he claimed to have invented) homemade recordings. Ramsey used the same reel-to-reel tape machine to record Hurley that he had used in 1948 for what became Lead Belly’s Last Sessions (which is also available on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings). This new vinyl LP reissue of First Songs includes the original liner notes by Ramsey.
And by way of a “visualizer”, we have an animation by Hurley’s friend Drew Christie, who describes sharing the animation years ago with Hurley himself: “When I finished the animation, I showed it to Michael down in Astoria, and he loved it right away. He said, ‘That’s always how I pictured him moving and stepping! You got it!’”
